Young and naïve, she was one of the many victims of the sex grooming gang – but was the first to speak out against their horrific abuse.

Her nightmare began when she was only 15. A troubled teenager, she decided to move out of her parents’ home to live with an older girl.

‘She introduced me to these men and we’d get free alcohol and cigarettes and food and free taxis and things,’ she said.

‘At first I thought it were great because nothing had happened, like nothing sexual. I just thought “I can get all this stuff for free”.’

But one day things took a sickening turn for the worse.

The older girl took her to a kebab shop and introduced her to staff who plied them with vodka and food in an upstairs room. She said: ‘It made me feel like I was pretty.

‘I never thought they’d do what they did to me because you don’t think that do you?’

On one visit an older man asked her to go upstairs with him for a chat.‘I didn’t really think anything of it,’ she said. ‘Then he was basically saying about all the things he’s bought for me and he wants something back for it. Then I was saying “No”, like, I was kind of saying it like in a giggly way.

‘I felt like if I’d said it nastily to him he could have hurt me. I tried to say no in a nice way, but he just weren’t having it.’

It was then, she says, the older man forced himself on her and raped her on a mattress.